Stanford University reserches foud that Texas earthquakes are man-made, caused by wastewater injections aka eFraking
|In 2012 and 2013, a series of earthquakes struck near the town of Timpson in eastern Texas. So a the team of American and British Standford researchers dicided to look into the earthquakes,Over the course of a year and a half texas suffered earthquates reached a magnitude of 4.8.ñ. Acording to their paper, published in the journal Science, the wells, which had wastewater injected at the depth of over 1 mile, lie directly above where the earthquake occurred.
The researchers used Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar, or InSAR, to track the ground movements in the quakes and establish that their causes weren’t natural.
Our study reports on the first observations of surface uplift associated with wastewater injection. The detection of uplift when combined with well-injection records provides a new way to study wastewater injection,” study co-author William Ellsworth, a geophysics professor at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, told the university’s website.
The scientists examined four high-volume wells near Timpson, which had around 760 million liters of wastewater pumped into them annually at peak activity.
The satellite data revealed that the two deep wells west of the town were responsible for the quake,
“The area was shaken pretty thoroughly over ain period of about 18 months,” Ellsworth said, adding that the tremors stopped only when the injections were drastically decreased.Peper https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aag0262